GARDEN GROVE : She’s <i> One </i> of 1st Female Postmasters

Heralded as the city’s first female postmaster during her swearing-in this week, Alyce Alford actually missed that distinction--by about 70 years, it seems.

Records kept by local historians and family members show that resident Mabel A. Head became the town’s postmaster in 1922.

Postmasters were political appointees in those days and Head lost her job in 1934 when the Democratic Party came into power, said postal historian Muriel Head Menasco, who is Head’s niece.

After losing her job, Head stayed on as a clerk until she retired in 1947, Menasco said. Her aunt died in 1960 at the age of 75, she said.

Shortly before Head was replaced, Garden Grove High School Principal Leroy L. Doig and Methodist Church Pastor Grover Ralston wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to retain her as postmaster.

They said she “rendered unusually good service” to the community of about 2,000 residents. The letter said that a petition with 550 signatures was enclosed, endorsing the request.

Doig and Ralston noted that Head had a slight lameness from having scarlet fever and might have trouble finding suitable employment.

Despite the plea, Head received a letter the next month from the U.S. Post Office Department informing her that she had been reassigned as a clerk, but only if that could be accomplished without eliminating somebody else’s job.

“She was put back on the bottom of the pile,” said Menasco, who has written about the history of the Head family. “Can you imagine that kind of thing happening today? I call it discrimination of the worst kind.”

Menasco, an Orange resident, said her aunt went back to work in the post office because of the lack of employment opportunities.

Head was replaced as postmaster by rancher Clair Head, who was not related, according to Menasco.

Clair Head disappeared without a trace in a boating accident in Mexico in 1943 and was succeeded in office by his wife, Gladys, the second woman to hold that position in Garden Grove. Gladys Head quit her job as principal at Orangethorpe School in Fullerton to be the postmaster, according to her nephew, Robert Wilson of Huntington Beach.

She married the postmaster of Bakersfield a few years later and moved to that city, Wilson said. She is now deceased.

Wilson said this week that he believed his aunt was the first woman postmaster in the city and that he had not heard about Mabel Head.

Post office historian Fred Coles, a former letter carrier in Garden Grove, said that Congress authorized the establishment of the Garden Grove Post Office in 1877.

David Webster was the first acting postmaster, and when he died, his wife took over briefly, but she was not considered a permanent, full-time postmaster. Mabel Head earned that distinction, Coles said.

U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Christine Dugas said that postal records in Washington fail to go back far enough to confirm that Mabel Head and Gladys Head preceded Alford as female postmasters.

“If indeed they were postmasters, my apologies go to the families,” Dugas said. “I don’t want to slight their tenures.”